The extra layer of tragedy in Omar Khadr’s story is that he was left to rot in Guantanamo long enough that his deprivations don’t count as revelations. By now, he is just another data point in the horrors that have come out of that place, even if he’s an extreme one.

Arriving at the notorious detention centre at 16, he was the youngest prisoner — and last Westerner — to be subjected to techniques like “the human mop” — as revealed in Patrick Reed and Michelle Shepherd’s documentary, it involved being forced to pee on the floor and then roll around in it to clean it up.

The details will be familiar to anyone who followed Khadr’s journey: 15-year-old child soldier/Afghan courier to a 29-year-old survivor of torture puttering around a suburban Edmonton home. It’s not worth rehashing it all here, though Guantanamo’s Child makes a good, subtle case that very few of us sought many details on anything that went on in Afghanistan or Cuba. The original parts we get include an obviously shaken American interrogator wondering how he or anyone else could have behaved the way he did while effectively torturing a wounded child, a Guantanamo superior officer who bemoans his own role in what was essentially a kangaroo court to convict Khadr, and the man himself, almost disconcertingly equanimous while talking about his experience.

Reed and Shepherd do a reasonable job of injecting some level of balance into their straightforward retelling. They give time to American soldiers who make no bones about calling him a terrorist who killed their countrymen and let the likes of Stephen Harper and Vic Toews bluster through press conferences saying the same. They let his family weigh in with opinions that wouldn’t sound entirely out of place coming from Taliban mouths, and detail his father’s status as a power broker who never much concerned himself with the morality of the people he was dealing with (or making his son deal with).

Weighed against the testimony of fellow inmates, Khadr’s fatherly lawyer Dennis Edney and the man himself, these only serve to drive home how ridiculous the people who opposed his release were: he was a child, and then we tortured him. As one of the men who spent time with him in prison puts plainly, it’s very hard to claim the moral high ground when you do things like that.